1. Field of the Invention
The present invention generally relates to the use and management of groups. More particularly, the present invention relates to providing a robust and flexible group structure for using and managing groups for enterprise security and entitlement.
2. Related Art
Operations with groups are useful in a variety of fields. These group operations serve numerous purposes. In the field of network security, certain group or groups of users can be defined to facilitate authenticating the users and to provide authorized access to resources on the network.
Generally, a business rule represents a particular group of users and the particular resources accessible on the network to this particular group of users. There are many management products for defining business rules. However, this feature (ability to define business rules) cannot be easily and scalably used by business users to create business rules, especially if the business user is a large company, since these management products do not address several issues.
Typically, there is no clear definition/separation of different groups and there is no concept of group components. Moreover, there is no attempt to make groups reusable between different applications on the network. Furthermore, these management products fail to make groups that have ownership attributes and that can be shared. Also, these management products are not flexible and robust enough so that multiple group components can be put together and apart easily. Lastly, there is no structure for organizing the groups.